1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a shredder for shredding paper sheets, particularly to a shredder with paper feeder capable of automatically feeding and shredding multiple paper sheets, and to a paper feeder.
2. Description of Related Art
In order to prevent information theft, the practice in recent years is not to simply discard documents as they are but to dispose of them after cutting them into fine pieces with a shredder or other such cutting apparatus. Although the performance of shredders has improved considerably and many are now capable of fine shredding, a problem remains in that the number of sheets that can be shredded at one time is limited. Shredders marketed to date require the user to manually insert a single sheet or up to a manufacturer-specified maximum number of sheets into the shredder slot, so that the user must stay at the shredder throughout the shredding operation, which may be quite long when shredding a large number of sheets.
A need has therefore been felt for the development of a shredder with paper feeder, i.e., a shredder equipped with a dedicated paper feeder that can automatically shred a large number of document sheets, and of a paper feeder for use with the shredder.
A typical example of the shredder according to the prior art is described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2005-46827.